Senior Online
Telematics DE4002
DELIVERABLE D6.1
Senior Online First Demonstrator
Written by:
Roland Alton-Scheidl
Marina Giardino
Margit Lutowsky
John Nissen
Jacob Palme
Contractual Date of Delivery: 31/08/1999
Actual Date of Delivery: 31/10/1999
Nature of the Deliverable: RE
Deliverable Type: Draft
Workpackage WP06
Task 6.1
Responsibility: Omega Generation S.r.l.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 2
2 INTRODUCTION 3
2.1 THE COMPONENTS OF THE SENIOR ONLINE FIRST DEMONSTRATOR 3
2.2 REASONS FOR THE DELAY OF THE FIRST DEMONSTRATOR 4
2.3 Main Design Principles 4
2.4 OVERVIEW OF THE SENIOR ONLINE FIRST DEMONSTRATOR ARCHITECTURE 5
2.5 WHICH SERVICES IN THE THREE SYSTEMS OF THE SENIOR ONLINE FIRST DEMONSTRATOR 6
2.6 FIRST DEMONSTRATOR SECURITY 8
3 OVERVIEW OF DEVELOPMENT FOR THE FIRST DEMONSTRATOR 8
3.1 KOM 2000 8
3.2 WEB4GROUPS 9
3.3 THE DIRECTORY SYSTEM 13
3.4 The Cupid Mini-browser 15
4 References 16
5 Appendix A: The KOM 2000 User Interface for Senior Online 17
5.1 How the new interface was developed 17
5.2 Main Principles of the new User Interface 18
5.3 Forums and Chats 20
5.4 Forum membership 22
5.5 Use of Frames 23
5.6 E-mail 23
6 Appendix B: Screenshots from Web4Groups 2.0 and the Senior Online Portal 24
6.1 Some screenshots from Web4Groups 2.0 24
6.2 Some Screenshots from the Portal 26
6.3 A screen shot from the First Class service 28
1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Senior Online First Demonstrator is a set of web-based services specially designed for elderly people. It combines services for finding web pages, forums and users on the Internet, for discussion in same-time chats and different-time forums, to send and receive e-mail including in-line pictures and other services required by the Senior Online users.
The First Demonstrator is to a large extent made up of already existing software, sometimes with our own additional development to suit the Senior Online users.
2 INTRODUCTION
Starting from user requirements, a first set of functionalities was defined and developed for the Senior Online first demonstrator. The Senior Online first demonstrator fully offers the services that users associations indicated as fundamental in order that elderly people easily use the Internet. Since there is no single product which can provide all the functions of Senior Online, Senior Online services are provided combining different existing and newly developed products. Therefore, the Senior Online project's technological challenge is to integrate heterogeneous products and environments that have been run and developed independently from each other so far. The integration will be completed at the end of the Project.
2.1 THE COMPONENTS OF THE SENIOR ONLINE FIRST DEMONSTRATOR
The products that make up of the first demonstrator are:
· a Portal, providing a multilingual entry point to Senior Online services (newly developed)
· a directory system (newly developed)
· a distributed groupware system, KOM 2000 (existing, modified for Senior Online)
· a large-scale groupware system, Web4Groups (existing, modified for Senior Online)
Moreover, we are investigating possibilities to integrate an already established groupware, First Class, largely tested and used by some users' associations.
The two kinds of groupware systems in the first demonstrator, KOM 2000 and Web4Groups, satisfy different user needs: the distributed one can be used in local copies in different organisations, the large-scale one is suitable for very large user groups, such as municipalities providing services to the citizens. The Groupware systems are products which provide various services to support groups of people and their interaction.
In the first demonstrator, the above systems will not be completely integrated and connected to each other yet. This will be realized in the ongoing development processes.
However, all the Senior Online components already have the main definitive features: the interface, the functionalities, the services.
Thus we are able to provide a good impression of the look and feel of the end product.
2.2 REASONS FOR THE DELAY OF THE FIRST DEMONSTRATOR
The original plan was to have the first demonstrator ready for demonstrations in August 1999.
This has however met with some problems.
Based on the user requirements and the experience from the existing groupwares, it was decided to design a new user interface for both KOM 2000 and Web4Groups. This work started with a series of observations and questionnaires to elderly people already using them and First Class. Both experienced and less experienced people participated in these trials.
The new user interface is carefully designed to be easy to use for elderly people. This development and testing of the new user interface has taken so much time, that the first demonstrator cannot be ready in August.
Furthermore, since the Portal and the Directory system are newly developed, the users requirements about them have not been based on testing the final products. Instead, the users had to imagine the Portal interface and to select the Senior Online services to put in it. This effort took time and the task was not easy. Many features of the Portal, and of the Directory system too, have been recently defined.
The first demonstrator will be ready in October 1999. It will consist of different components, running in different countries. Full integration of the different components will not be ready in the first demonstrators. The main components will be:
· The Portal and the Directory system at http://floyd.omega.it/sol
· The KOM 2000 groupware and e-mail system at http://cmc.dsv.su.se/KOM2000/
· The Web4Groups groupware and e-mail system at http://www.senioronline.at
· The Promotional pages at http://www.senioronline.org
2.3 Main Design Principles
We will provide a common look and feel to all the national doorsteps. We have tried to accommodate the Web Accessibility Guidelines (WAG) [6] from the World Wide Web consortium. These guidelines are especially designed to make the WWW accessible for people with various kinds of disabilities. However, the WAG have a problem in that they recommend use of functions not well supported by current web browsers. Because of this, it is not possible to follow them in every detail.
2.4 OVERVIEW OF THE SENIOR ONLINE FIRST DEMONSTRATOR ARCHITECTURE
In this section, we are going to describe the way to access the first demonstrator and the available services.
2.4.1 HOW TO ACCESS THE SENIOR ONLINE SERVICES: THE PORTAL
What is a Portal?
A Portal is a web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums and search engines.
When a user connects to Senior Online (http://www.senioronline.org), s/he connects to the Senior Online Portal, a web page inviting the user to select a country.
The listed countries are the countries of all the partners in the project. Later on, also other European countries will be added.
Selecting a country means connecting to a Senior Online National Portal.
Figure 1 is a diagram showing the steps to reach a National Portal.
Figure 1: Connecting to Senior Online
Each National Portal shows first a web page listing all the main Senior Online services, from a user point of view, in the major language of that country (no EU country with more than one major language is a partner of the project).
The listed services in each National Portal are:
· Access to some Help Pages about Internet use, for users new to the Internet
· Access to Senior Online Promotional Pages, to learn more about the Project
· Access to the services offered by the local users association, to use them and to learn more about what's happening in the region
· Access to e-mail service, provided by the local groupware system
· Access to chat, provided by the KOM 2000 groupware system
· Access to the directory system, to find a list of seniorsites in the Internet
· Access to a list of Senior Online users, provided by the directory system
· Access to web sites offering games
Note: This list of services may be changed, depending on user input.
There are more services provided by the Senior Online first demonstrator, but they cannot be used directly from the Portal. We are going to describe them below.
2.5 WHICH SERVICES IN THE THREE SYSTEMS OF THE SENIOR ONLINE FIRST DEMONSTRATOR
In the previous section, we listed the services appearing in the Senior Online Portal, based on the user requirements.
There are links both to information web pages and to services provided by the groupwares and the directory systems.
The Senior Online groupwares and directory systems provide more services, available to the users when they access to a system.
The main services provided by the three systems are:
· Forums, provided by the Groupwares
A forum is an area of messages. Since the forums are stored in a server, contributions can be written by one person at one time, read by another person at a later time and read by yet another person at an even later time. Such communication system is non-simultaneous. A forum can be:
· Open forum: anyone can participate
· Closed forum: only allowed people can participate. Usually, everyone can see forum name and description; if not, the Closed forum is a Secret forum
· Moderated forum: forums for which contributions are checked by a moderator
· Restricted forum: only members can submit contributions
Each forum is subject to access control.
· E-mail, provided by the Groupwares
E-mail is Web-based and compatible with Internet e-mail standards (SMTP, MIME). Messages can contain in-line pictures and files.
· Directory system, provided by the Portal
A Directory system is a computer system which allows users to find information in directories.
The Senior Online Directory system allows finding:
· Users, and information related to them (e-mail address, home page, etc.)
· Forums, and information related to them (the way to join them included)
· Groupware servers, and information related to them (the way to join them included)
· Web pages, which elderly people can be interested in
The users can find information by textual search (for example: "Find the e-mail address of John Smith") and/or following links from topic to subtopic (for example: Botany à Tropical flowers). They can also limit their searching only to items stored in a particular language directory, since each language has its own directories.
The communication between a Groupware user and the Directory system can be organised in two ways:
1. direct communication: a user click on a link to get to the Directory system
2. indirect communication: a user gives some instructions to the groupware, so that the groupware finds information in the directory
2.6 FIRST DEMONSTRATOR SECURITY
By security is meant protection against various kinds of risks (for example: someone getting your private e-mail, someone writing a false message in your name). To provide security, the Senior Online first demonstrator requires user identification (username and password) and lists who is allowed to do what (authorisation).
Further security instruments are still in discussion.
3 OVERVIEW OF DEVELOPMENT FOR THE FIRST DEMONSTRATOR
In this section we are going to describe the three Senior Online systems as stand-alone applications.
3.1 KOM 2000
KOM 2000 is a distributed groupware server application written in Java under Unix.
It was developed by the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences in the KTH Technical University of Stockholm, Sweden, and it is based on the results of the EU project Web4Groups, ended in February 1998. KOM 2000 has been further developed for Senior Online aims.
All KOM 2000 servers can communicate with each other, replication is fully automatic, no manual action is needed to set up replication of new forums to all servers.
KOM 2000 uses a Web based user interface, so that users can access it using an ordinary web browser.
Users are identified by login name and password. Keys are used between servers to ensure that outsiders cannot access restricted information.
KOM 2000 provides forums, chat, e-mail and news.
Forums:
KOM 2000 provides open, closed and moderated forums, organised in a hierarchical structure of folders and subforums.
Access control is connected with this structure, i.e. a forum announced in a certain branch is only available to users with access right to that branch. Users with access right to a forum can themselves subscribe and the organiser of a forum can add members to it.
Contributions can be written in multiple languages. When a contribution has been submitted, translation can be added. A user can specify a personal list of preferred languages and will read contributions in the first preferred and available language.
Contributions referring to previous ones form threads, accessible and scannable by KOM 2000 tools.
Chat:
Simultaneous textual discussions whose content is stored in forums.
E-mail:
Every e-mail user can send messages to users and to (open/moderated) forums in KOM 2000.
KOM 2000 users can also send messages to external e-mail addresses.
An address book with a collection of names and e-mail addresses of users and forums is available.
E-mail is formatted using the MIME and MHTML standards.
News:
The server knows which messages each user has seen and marks new e-mail and forum messages with a red flag in the user interface.
Additional functions
KOM 2000 also has an e-mail notification facility, a voting facility and a help facility.
Message format:
Messages are in HTML format, including attachments and in-line graphics.
Users can write messages in either plain text or HTML format, they can upload pictures and attachments to be included in messages, they can send a message to many forums, users and e-mail addresses at the same time.
When a user subscribes a forum, s/he gets access to all the messages in the forum, also those written before the user joined the forum. An e-mail notification, reporting all the new contributions to the forum to which the user is subscribed, is sent at a regular intervals.
3.2 WEB4GROUPS
Web4Groups is a large-scale distributed groupware system, based on the Web4Groups 2.0 software, which is developed by WebforUs, a joint venture of Kapsch AG, Omega Generation S.r.l. and PUBLIC VOICE Labor.
Web4Groups 2.0 is a new development in the field of teamwork and group communication for Internet and Intranet and offers a refurbished user interface and a modern distributed server network architecture.